Sunday, May 31, 2015

When the dogs discovered something barkworthy last night and
woke me up I knew I had been really tired when I went sleep; it was ten O’clock
when they started barking. I figured I would never get back to sleep but
something else cranked them up and suddenly it was two in the morning. Oh, full
moon, that explains it. When the dogs can see outside at night they presume
there is something to see. They are rarely right and even when they are it isn’t
worth waking me up about. But I did wake up on my own about five. If I don’t
start mowing as soon as it’s light it’s going to be very hot, very dry, and
very dusty.

It’s hard to believe back in March we had a foot of rain. We’ve
had less than half that since then and none to speak off in a week or so. But
the grass is still too high so I must decapitate it all. At the sound of the
mower’s engine Tanya the Destroyer attacks one of the wheels. I have to chase
her away with a stick but now I must always carry a stick when I mow. Tanya is
an odd little beast and I cannot have her near the mower when it is cranked up.

At seven in the morning there is precious little dew and far
too much dust. The sandy soil of this region produces a fine dust that penetrates
and adheres. I create a cloud of dust behind me as I mow like an internal combustion
replication of Pigpen, the Peanuts character. The good news is that I have some
of the thickest grass knocked down before the sun begins to scorch the already
dry yard. The cloud becomes larger as the sun’s heat begins to drench the yard
in dryness. I can feel sweat beginning to creep down my back, down my face and
rivers run down my legs. A thin layer of dust settles on my lips and I know
better than t lick them. Even the gnats abandon me in the lawn care Dust Bowl I
have created.

It’s getting hot, but mostly it’s an odd combination of wet
air and dry earth. Does that seem right to you? The humidity is making the morning
breeze seem like the inside of a dead dragon’s mouth; warm, sticky, and fetid. This
isn’t the same fresh crisp feeling of early October or late March but rather the
beginning of the long slog of Summer. There will be humidity. It’s not the heat
it’s the humidity. It’s a skipping record, if you still remember what that
means, that will echo until somewhere towards the latter part of September. One
hundred and ten days away, relief sits like a mirage on the desert floor.

The only good thing about mowing, which I have hated since I
was a kid, is that it is mindless work. I can think of plots to stories and
there’s a sci fi story in my head that keeps popping up. Aliens invade earth
but they aren’t here with peace and laurels and technology. And they aren’t the
kind that heroic humans are going to have some epic battle with and be proved
victorious. No, these are move-in- and- take- over-and-kill- a- lot- of- people
aliens and they are so far advanced it’s over before it even begins. The
survivors are forced into increasingly smaller areas, like the grass being
mowed down, and as the aliens take more and more the humans are forced to fight
one another for each small group to survive, even though they know it’s wrong.

You have to remember that included in Custer’s Last Stand,
were a handful of Native American scouts. How do you think they felt leading an
American army against Native People? They had to feel some sort of kinship with
the Sioux but there they were. At that point in time there really was no hope
for any sort of resistance to American invasion but those who were left had to
either get on the payroll or try to fight back. Do you think you would be any
different? Do you think if you were taken up in an alien spacecraft and shown
that most of the humans on earth were already dead, most of the cities totally
gone, and not one alien harmed during all of this that you wouldn’t try to find
a way to save you and yours, even if it meant that some other group of humans
might be wiped out? Everyone comes out of a movie theater after watching “Independence
Day” feeling like they would have been one of those guys knockin’em out of the
sky but the reality of an invasion from space would look a lot more like the Native
American fight during the late 1800’s if not a whole lot worse.

The plot forms as the grass ends all real organized
resistance to the spinning blade. They have the blade outnumbered millions to
one but the blade has technology and the wheel. Odd bands of grass crowd around
in corners and edges, waiting for their chance to spring back into the yard,
tall and proud but the weedeater is going to appear out of nowhere and end it,
once and for at least a week. This will be the last time I mow before June,
which is tomorrow, and after that, once a week, for at least three and a half
months, so that’s about fifteen more times of doing this. Wow! So much to look
forward to in the Summer!

The engine chokes and dies as I release the handle and the
yard is tamed again. I can feel a thin layer of grit all over me and there is
still a cloud of dust hovering over the mass slaughter of thousands of blade
via the blade. The irony of blades of grass murdered by a blade is not lost on
me. In a way, I mourn the loss of the wildness of this area even as I
participate in keeping it civilized.

As I push the mower back into the shed I realize that I,
too, have led Custer west.

Monday, May 25, 2015

If you are ever really broke and wonder how on earth you’re
going to feed yourself cheap, may I kindly introduce you to Black Beans,
Chicken, and Rice? Three leg quarters, two cups of brown rice, and a cup of
black beans is enough for me to eat lunch on three days this week. That will
cover the whole week, because today is a holiday, and on Thursdays Subway has a
special running so I’m done planning lunch. I’m willing to bet I had less than
ten bucks on the whole thing.

The crock pot is quite possibly the greatest invention of
all time, next to the wheel, the discovery of how to build a fire, and USB
ports in vehicles. In warmer weather, which covers just about every month except
the three months of Christmas here in The South, a crock pot does put out a lot
of heat for a long time, but I like that too. Yeah, it’s more than a little
weird, but there’s something that makes me feel like I’m doing something in the
kitchen when I sweat over it. It's like sex; you have to make that effort to get things right. Then again, I’m not running the AC yet so I’m
sweating anyway. It’s going to take the temperatures getting into the mid-nineties
during the day and the mid-seventies at night before I cave and turn on the AC.
Last year I almost made it into July before having to crank in the cold air.

This morning about four or so I couldn’t sleep, I knew the
dogs would awaken and demand food soon anyway, so I got up and let the Girls Go
Wild, and got the crock pot out. One cup of black beans, enough water to cover
them and have a half inch above them, and the crock pot on Low. I set the timer
on the stove for seven hours. At eleven the beans were still a little hard so I
turned the heat up, added two cups of brown rice, a little salt, and put the
chicken in a pot to boil it for about an hour or so. After the chicken boiled I
slipped it in with the beans and rice and mixed everything up together. Another
two hours at low heat and that’s lunch for the rest of the week.

My first apartment didn’t have AC. It was a furnace in
Summer but I got used to it. The kitchen had one of those strip thermometers
that changed colors on the fridge and when it went totally black that meant it
was over one hundred degrees. I have no idea what happened to that thermometer
but I do know for about three months out of the year it stayed as black as
night. This is a much cooler house and I have ceiling fans as well. As long as
the inside temp stays away from ninety I’m pretty much okay during the day. At
night it has to be below eighty-five inside for me to sleep. So far so good.

The chicken and rice and bean are beginning to smell really,
really, good. I do a lot of my cooking by sense of smell. When it smells right
then it’s done. That may not be very accurate for most but it’s never failed
me. My spaghetti sauce is one of those things that tells me when it is ready.
It’s the garlic. When the garlic is done then the sauce is done. How could
anything be done until the garlic says so? Most people toss the garlic in with
everything else but to me it has to come near the end. Garlic is underused and
overcooked mostly. It’s misunderstood as well. Most people consider it a spice
but for me it is more of a spiritual thing; it’s like Holy Water at a baptism
or wine on the third date. It’s more than just there with everything else it is
sometimes what makes everything else what it is.

An aromatic spice with a distinctive bitter flavor and
strong, warm aroma due to its abundant oil content. Cumin "seeds" are
actually the small dried fruit of an annual plant in the parsley family. Native
to the Mediterranean, cumin is hotter to the taste, lighter in color, and
larger than caraway, another spice it's sometimes confused with. Sold whole or
ground, the seeds come in three colors: amber, white or black. Amber is most
widely available, but the black has such a complex flavor it should not be substituted
for the other two. Cumin is a popular ingredient in Middle Eastern, Asian,
Mediterranean and Mexican cuisines, and is one of the main ingredients in curry
powder.

I never make black beans and rice with chicken without
Cumin, Black Cumin at that. I have no idea how much to use or how much I do use
but I know it’s a lot according to the people who watch me cook. Not so much
salt, and sea salt at that, but Black Pepper, yes, please. I have no idea what
human beings did before Black Pepper, freshly ground Black Pepper, was
discovered but I’m pretty sure we weren’t very happy at that point.

I always make enough rice to give the dogs some mixed in
with their food. Lucas loved rice and would have drool-icles coming from both
sides of his mouth as I cooked. You have to admire that sort of food focus. It’s
the kind of attention grabber women had on me in High School but I didn’t
realize it for what it was worth at the time. Youth may be wasted on the young
but rice was never wasted on Lucas.

I don’t regret the decisions that led me to be this broke
for this long. I’m not sure I will ever be as solvent as I once was but there
are lessons to be learned in loss. You can try and fail and the fail not be as
important as the try. You can trade everything you own for that one chance to
save a dog’s life and even if it doesn’t go as planned, even if all you bought
with everything you could put into it, fifteen months, fifteen fucking months,
it is still the best trade I have ever made in my entire life.

I’m still saving lives and still have dogs and if Brown Rice
and Black Beans and Chicken is what I eat with my memories I could not be
happier.

Sunday, May 24, 2015

Generally speaking, I like to listen to classical music when
I’m writing or driving. Amazon has great deals on classical collections so I
can create playlists where none of the songs are less than ten minutes in
length. I can put some miles down behind me at ten minutes a song. I lock the
cruise control down and turn up the sound. There are plots to be hashed out and
many more chapters to write before I put the truck in park again. Actually, I
drive a stick. There isn’t a park to put the truck in.

There’s a folder on my jump that contains all of Beethoven’s
Symphonies. All are good, so very good, but I like the Ninth best. The last
time I went to Mom’s house I started out with the First and by the time I got
home I was near the Ninth. The whole day passed with one composer and it was
glorious. I can write that way, too. Give me a few hours of long songs and
something to write. And now, at this very moment while I’m writing, I have
something else that needs to be written. I can feel it. It’s there but not yet,
not yet, not yet, but it is there.

It’s an odd thing. Sometimes writing is like being with a
woman you know is going to make love to you, but not tonight. You have no idea
why she’s waiting or what she’s waiting for, but you have to let her say yes on
her terms or it’s not going to be right. You realize there’s a tipping point
where she isn’t going to say no but at the same time, it’s still not the same
as the woman telling you yes. You know her well enough by now to know what she
likes and how much she likes it, but you realize at some level that’s like
getting her too drunk on a wine she loves. At that moment, when her body is
overriding both her heart and her mind, if there is any blood left in your own
head, you have to slowly back away, let the heat subside as slowly as it was
built up, and allow the moment to be what it is, and what it isn’t. She’ll go
to the bathroom, take a few deep breaths, get everyone dried off, give herself
a stern talking to, and then come out and suggest the two of you get upright
and do something less heady. All the while she’ll be wondering if she should have
stopped, if she should have stopped going where everything she owned wanted her
to go, and after you leave she’ll take a shower and wish you were still there
with her. All of that is much better than the woman waking up the next morning
and wondering if you both moved too quickly into the fire and wondering of
she’ll get burned.

The parts of the story haven’t come together yet but they’re
getting there and this, even this, is helping put things in place. There’s a
character who is missing. There is someone else who is supposed to be there who
serves some purpose, a woman, yes, see this is what I’m talking about, that
woman, she hasn’t arrived, and today she’ll be formed out of the clay I’ll be
given while I talk to people. I know who I want to talk to today and find out
more about her, and I’ll form this woman from another. For there to be evil
there has to be good destroyed. There has to be someone who did something right
and someone else did something wrong. It appeals to our basic instinct of
fairness for there to be punishment to fit the crime.

There are times a writer reaches out for something and when
it arrives there is far too much to be dealt with immediately.

(at this point I stopped and went to the Adoption Event, yesterday,
and today began again)

There’s a woman I know who I will form into the story, parts
of her, because I don’t know her very well, but she is perfect for the part. Or
parts of her are perfect for part of the story. I like the way she looks,
beautiful without the fanfare that some women have to have when they are in
public, and I can see the scene perfectly in my mind now, the villain seeking
redemption from a woman he wronged, and she acknowledging the crime but moving
past it. It’s irrelevant to her if he’s redeemed or not. She has a life and
will live and sends him on his way to live his own. The power he had over her
is gone and now he realizes that what he has lost is both larger and beyond his
ability to repair.

Yes, this is the scene I have been waiting for. This is the
character. She will be sitting at a table, smoking a cigarette, still trying to
quit, and she’s putting the final touches on a drawing for a tattoo. He talked
her into having his name inked on her body but she’s covered it, obliterated
his name and in its place is a memorial for someone who truly loved her. He can’t
compete with that. He can’t compete with love.

I actually spoke to the woman yesterday and told her I
wanted to write her into this story and she seemed flattered. It’s not like the
people we both know will recognize her but there are people who I’ve borrowed
before. Most would not be flattered, you know.

So today I crank up the music, and find some time to write.
The story isn’t totally here yet but enough has arrived for me to get started. I
think today will be violins, yes, stringed inspiration, and a lot of it. The music
of masters long dead but never forgotten will once again echo through the house
as people in real life become compilations and people never real are born of
imagination.

Monday, May 18, 2015

Tanya is a little confused about her feral little sister,
Tyger Linn. There are two sofas and a bed, it is night, why must we rush out
into the yard when there is a noise, when that noise is clearly not a human
intruder? But Tyger Linn has an ancient calling when it comes to her home; any
trespasser is a bad trespasser. Lilith and Tanya want more clarification if it
involves having to give up the spot next to me.

Tyger responds better to hand signals than the other two
will. She understands that voices carry and that silence is a weapon that makes
no sound when unsheathed. Give me six like this one and I will own the forest.
I wonder what I would do with one hundred acres or unlimited space in the wild.
Give me a pack of small and hard muscled canines who know my thoughts and know
their jobs. Oh, yeah, we’re going to need a fire.

It had to be a fairly hard sell, at first, fire. It’s
dangerous and unpredictable stuff. It requires maintenance. There had to be a
group of cavemen who sat there and very pointedly observed that this new thing,
this fire, destroyed night vision. It created deeper shadows in the night. Who
knew where those sparks went as they danced in the sky and after all, just what
in the hell was that stuff anyway? There had to be that debate. “Come on, man,
you don’t even know what that stuff is and you want to bring it inside?” “What
if the Spirits want it back?” “What if it attacks us in the middle of the
night?” “What if it’s some sort of Demon?”

And the debate raged on.

At first it wasn’t much of a debate because fire was
something that showed up after lightning strikes and no one knew how to draw it
out of the sky without there being a cremation. But there were those early
people who watched sparks fly from rocks and wondered…There were those who felt
the heat of friction and had thoughts… Who knows how the first fire was started
or who started it. The first Firesmith must have amused the hell out of his
family, sitting there knocking rocks together or rubbing sticks furiously while
everyone else hunted or gathered or watched out for predators.

Slowly, but surely, the technique tightened. This worked
better than that, and this worked better with this material. The early humans were highly attuned to one
another, had a heighten sense of smell, and they could tell by the excitement
of the Firesmith and the smell of the smoke, hey, he’s making what seems to be
a tiny fire out of those sticks and rocks! Look at this, hey, come over here,
HOLY MOTHER OF FRED FLINTSTONE IT IS FIRE!

And there it was. A tiny fire made into a larger one which
everyone sat there and stared at as if it had just appeared by magic. Was it
magic? Was it of this world? But there the first Firesmith is, eyes gleaming,
sweat pouring of his body, or her body, and there’s the fire, right there on
the cave floor, and suddenly there’s the first need for firewood and the debate
as to what the hell are we going to do now that we have it?

Suppose it was cold outside, very cold, and the Firesmith
knew there were those in the tribe, very young and very old, who would not see
another Spring or their first one. Yet the fire crackles and the cave is warmer
and old hands, wrinkled with age and scarred by many years of hunting are held
out to feel life again. The newborn suckles noisily as her mother feels the
warmth envelope body and child. The doubters are still doubters but now they
can clearly see that fire means their own children and their own parents will
live longer. I still don’t trust this stuff but let’s go get some firewood.

Our first grandparents were created by fire, I believe.
There were the first elderly human, pushing thirty, who has seen many other
senior citizens buried and mourned, never to see another Spring but now there
is this. The other members of the tribe desperately want to keep that wealth of
information, the stories, the hunting techniques, and all that has been learned
in a lifetime, and now this… The winter will not kill them.

A largish cat sits on her haunches and considers the
activity in the cave. The devourer of forests has erupted in the den of humans
and she awaits their screams of terror. She has hunted in front of fires
before, it’s risky certainly, but it can be done, but after a while she
realizes something is wrong. Two of the humans walk right out of the cave and
they are carrying this thing with them, on a branch, and there is no fear. The
feline slips further into the darkness and the humans collect wood. Wood? The
cat feels confusion. Something is well amiss here but she knows that different
is dangerous so she seeks safer prey. She will not kill an old human today.

There is a woman who remembers many summers and many winters
and she sings songs about the plants she loves and how they heal the body and
sooth the mind. The fire crackles and hisses while the tribe listens and
remembers her words. The Firesmith feeds the fire, not too much, but just
enough, and suddenly one of the young men stares at the walls, at the shadows
thrown from the flames. With a bit of charcoal he draws lines and shapes and
suddenly the tribe sees horses and deer and because of the shadows of the
flickering fire, the herd beasts seem to be running, their legs moving, and
even the singer must stop with wonder. The first artist was born out of fire, I
believe, the first to use the dimension of moving light. Dreams, where
everything is surreal, was mimicked by fire and ironically we could spend more
time seeing at night in firelight.

There must have been a grandchild, tall and fell wed, the
daughter perhaps of the same couple whose son was a Firesmith, and she was the
first to gather the information from a Grandmother, and a mother, two
generations of knowledge now, not just one, not just that of the parents but
now she sees the world from further away. She will remember her Grandmother’s
voice and the way her eyes started into the flames. She will pass this vision
to another daughter and another granddaughter and they will become the first
generations to have never lived without fire.

There’s something to be said for true darkness, I know that.
Tyger Linn is somewhere out to my left, on the perimeter, her ears and nose
silent radar. Tanya lumbers around in the brush and Lilith stays close by my
side. This is primal and dark and it is good. This is the world before fire and
before light. But I crave the heat and the flame. My mind yearns to bask in the
glow of coals that seem deeper than any ocean and warmer than any sun. For as
much as we humans might love the darkness we love more separating ourselves
from it and bringing forth our sight. Somewhere, many thousands of years ago, a
human being set forth to create fire from wood or rock, and in that, created
me.

Saturday, May 16, 2015

It’s an odd problem, I admit it, but it’s been with me all
my life. I have a decent vocabulary but I can’t pronounce about three quarters of
the words I know. Some are much harder than others. Way back in the 80’s I
bought a woman some flowers, just because I thought she might like them, and
she got mad at me. We had been dating for a while and she told me that if I had
bought her flowers without a reason I had done something wrong she was about to
hear about or I was being manipulative. This argument broke out in the middle
of dinner and I told her, “If you aren’t walking home, get in the car” and she
said, “I’m not finished” and I said, “We are” and we took it into the parking
lot.

The real problem began when I told her I was not being ma-nip,
ma-niploo-a, I wasn’t trying to manipulate her.

“Manipulative” she said as if she were daring me to repeat
it.

“Moo-not-a-trieme” I said and I realized she was a witch and
had cursed my tongue.

“Manipulative” she said again, with a gleam in her eye, and
I knew at that point she had taken over the argument and was now enjoying my
obvious inability to say a fairly common word.

I took a deep breath, looked her dead in the eye and said, “I-am-not-being-ma-nip-you-live-a-tive”
and she cracked up laughing. She laughed all the way to her place and even
though this was one of those we’re-done events she couldn’t control a very
serious case of the giggles.

The more stress I’m under the less likely I am to be able to
speak any known human language that involves words consisting of more than two syllables.
I actually speak better after a few beers because I sound drunk. When I’m sober
I sound like an illiterate serf trying to explain quantum mechanics to a group
of rabid five year olds on meth in an echo chamber.

Dinosaur names? Yeah, right. Scientific names for snakes?
Uh-huh, keep dreaming. The names of famous composers not named Smith? It sounds
like I’m chewing super glue and hair balls. I dated a woman with Polish ancestry
and she could speak seven languages fluently. She and I sat together and tried
to get me to pronounce her last name. I couldn’t get close. It was like trying
to juggle water.

And as bad as it sounds it gets even worse as it goes along.
I may be able to limp along and pronounce some words that have more than six
letters in them, but if someone asks me to repeat a word I just nailed,
flawlessly… I can’t. No, really, I can’t. I once used the word “Conflagration”
in a sentence and someone said, “What?” And
suddenly conflagration, one of my favorite words of all time, became an alien
tongue twister that required a second mouth to say properly. And because stress
makes it worse I was soon down to the “See Spot run! Run, Spot, run” level of
communication.

I once fumbled the word “Stenographic” and it sounded like I
was trying to invent a word that involved canned fire and illicit sex with a
secretary. The three people I was
speaking to, well, they began looking at me as if they knew what I was trying
to say and hoped I would say it soon, but instead I began to sound like Dracula
with a fishbone caught between two fangs, “Bluh! Bluh bluh!”

One of the true horrors in life is knowing what word is
perfect in a sentence and a thought, knowing how to say and use that word to
great effect, and suddenly my mouth freezes up as if there are no words left. “I’m sorry, you’ve spoken aloud twelve words
today without making a complete idiot of yourself. That exceeds your allowable
quota by ten words.” In Basic Training I tried to ask what purpose the epaulets
on our field jackets served. I managed to get out the first two or three words,
and it sounded like English, but then the connection between my brain and mouth
became severed. Had there been a King Cobra in my mouth I wouldn’t have been
able to spit the damn thing out. The Drill Instructor looked at me as if I was
about to have some sort of thrashing seizure. Ah, but he was a simple man;
there was no ailment that push-ups could not cure.

If you’re a woman and you’re curious about my level of
attraction I have for you (yes, I realize this is a very rare occurrence, please
don’t interrupt) then just take notice of how eloquent I happen not to be. If
three and four syllable words are causing me to stumble linguistically, (ask me
to say that one) then you can assume I’m serious. If I start talking about a
book I read and can’t repeat the title without two shots of tequila and a valium
I may be in love.

A few weeks ago I had to sit in a room with four attorneys
and give a deposition on something that happened five years ago. Given enough
time to think about it, and an eyewitness, and some notes I’ve taken, I might
be able to tell you what I had for lunch yesterday. However, in a time when my
ever present inability to communicate with human beings could have been more disastrous
than ever before, I managed to say, out loud and quite clearly, “Memory is both
malleable and fallacious in the very best of times and this isn’t the time to
rely on any device that fails to locate a pair of eyeglasses perched upon my
head.” And I think that scored a lot of points. I kept my answers down to “Yes”
or “No” or most honestly, “I do not remember”.

Maybe there is a lesson in that for me. Maybe if I just said
a whole lot less I would say it a whole lot better.

Friday, May 15, 2015

“I hate the damn beach,” Cal said and it surprised me
because I had always heard he loved the beach.

“I don’t like it either.” I replied and it was true. It’s
far too much sun and far too much sand and what I really liked are the waves,
but it’s always hot and always sandy.

“I don’t give a damn what you like.” Cal said and we fell
silent again.

“And I don’t much give a damn what my daughter likes,
either, even if it’s you.” Cal said suddenly. I sipped my beer and counted to
ten before taking another sip. Cal was hitting his pretty hard and if I couldn’t
talk to the son of a bitch I sure as hell could get drunk with him.

“You’re a,” and Cal paused as if he was searching for a way
to say it nicely, “you’re a writer? You just sit around and write? That’s it?
That’s what you do?” He drained his beer and tossed the can back into the
cooler. I drained mine, too. I reached for another.

“Get me one too, if you cando that.” Cal said as if I might
fumble the can or lose my way.

“And you were an,” and I paused in the same matter, “an
accountant? You just sat there and counted all day?”

“Was a time I would’a dragged your ass out there in the open
and made you bleed til I was tired of the color red.” He said this without a
bit of arrogance in his voice and I nodded because I felt like he might still
try it. “I did that, did she tell you I did that once? Her first boyfriend in
High School, did’she tell you about that?”

“Yeah, she did.” I lied hoping he wouldn’t tell me anyway,

“Fine young man, quarterback on the football team, good
family, all that stuff, but I knew if I messed up that pretty face I wouldn’t
have no trouble with the rest of’em. Brought her home after midnight smelling
of beer and cigarettes and was just going to drop her off and drive off. Pulled
the sum bitch right out of the window of his daddy’s car.” Cal killed his beer
in three gulps and so I did too. I got us both another one.

“Like to went to jail over it.” Call sighed. “Made him bleed
plenty but didn’t hurt him, really. I went to a lot of trouble not to hurt his
arm.” Call laughed hard and suddenly. “And I sure as hell didn’t hurt his fists
any!”

I raised my beer to salute him and then we drank together. I
finished first and got us another one.

“Kris,” Cal said, “she took her time getting over that one.
Rebellious type. Started bringing home flute players and mama’s boys and video
game experts. Flute player! How’s a man wake up one day and wanna play a damn
flute? But she never latched onto nobody until now. Went through eight years of
college bringing up that what couldn’t make it through a week of boot camp but
never the same one twice.”

Cal stopped talking and he must have realized what it
sounded like when he said what he had. We drank in silence for a while and when
he was done he got me one too. I killed mine and realized that I was nearing my
limit if I was going to drive. Or walk.

“Kris tell you about the Boann?” Cal asked but his voice was
lower now. He killed his beer very quickly and I struggled to drain mine. He
got us both another one and I took a gulp of it, trying to get it down in case
he chugged his right off the bat, but he leaned forward and looked out over the
water. “She wasn’t a large boat, just something for me to have after I retired
and I thought about renting her out, being a fishing guide, but I don’t know
shit about fish and I can’t stand fishing people. But it was fun to get out on
the water, and I fell in love. I started navigating with a sextant and a
compass, I wasn’t a whole lot good with it but I loved it. I started keep’n
charts and trying to figure out how the tides and currents worked. Live and
breathed it as much as I could while Kris was trying to get her Pee- Ache- Dee
and when she finally graduated she wanted to go out on the Boann and celebrate.
Had that damn vet she dated for a while, specialized in poodles or some such as
that. Man looked like he hadn’t seen daylight since he was a young’un. Had long
yeller hair that curled up like a girls. Like to had seen him in a foxhole
taking fire. Cal looked at me sideways as if he thought I would have something
to say about it but I didn’t. I took another gulp of beer and squeezed it down.
My eyes watered.

“Beautiful day, spectacular day, and the Poodle Boy ruined
it all because he couldn’t shut the hell up. I was ready to kill him and Kris
just kept laughing at me every time she could see I was about to explode. It
was his fault, really, and I wish’a Kris had brought that damn flute player
instead. I should have listened to the water, and the wind, but I didn’t, and I
knew I hadn’t done right, and that damn storm caught us out in the open before
I could make a run.”

Cal stopped and rubbed his hands through his hair and then
put his cap back on. He got us both a beer and didn’t say anything at all for a
while. We both drank in silence and I had just finished one beer and started on
the next. If I was going to marry Kris I was going to have to learn to drink. I
was getting intoxicated and it was getting hot. The heat waves rose like the
water and crashed into me. The sea breeze seemed to have died.

“I knew the storm was coming but we were already in when I
realized we weren’t getting around it. Whadda you do? I mean whadda you do? The
wind picked up from nothing to damn near gale and suddenly there was me and the
boat and there was the sea and the wind, and God Almighty had taken real boat
from real sailors and left nothing but a slick spot on the surface afterwards.
I fought that storm. I fought her like I was fightin’ for my family’s life, but truth is I fought it
because I had always wanted it. I wanted to know. I would have never took Kris
and her mama out there for that but it was better they were there, you see?
With them there I couldn’t give up or back down. I had to take everything that
storm had and I had to push the Boann as far as she would go. Poodle Boy was
screaming like a little girl and my wife made a mess of herself screaming with
him. I could hear’em squealing from the deck. But barely. The wind was up and
the water rose up to take the Boann from me. She wanted the boat and wanted me,
but mostly she wanted to take Kris from me, and she wanted me to know she
could. I’ve been shot at. I’ve had men try to kill me and I’ve put bullets in
those men. Grenada wasn’t nothing to talk about as far as wars go and it was
shameful to kill men who weren’t equal to what I was, and I knew they weren’t,
but the water was more than a match for anybody or anything. Three times I
rammed the stick hard forward, as tight as she would go, and gave the engines
all they could take. Three times the Boann climbed, and climbed, and she
climbed to the top of those waves and I eased her down the other side. Them
three times, them three waves, them three moments of my life meant more to me
than any medal I ever won. My boat, mine, my hand on the wheel, my own, and my
mind in that storm. Mine! Mine! I tell you I rode that thing like I was fucking
her.” And then Cal fell silence and drank his beer slowly. I hadn’t realized it
but I had stopped breathing. Kris had never mentioned this. I could see why. Cal
finished his beer and reached his hand out, and I put another beer in it. I
finished mine and started another.

“Finally, the wind backed down, just a little and the rain
slacked off. I still fought it but the storm was dying and then it was gone.
Just like that, the sun came out and you could see it walking out over the
water to try to kill somebody else for the rest of the day. My wife and Poodle
Boy were huddled together whimpering like someone had whipped them good, but
Kris was down on the bilge pump. It’s a handle that takes both hands to pull
and while I was trying to save her life she was trying to save mine. Her hands
were bloodied from the work and she had cracked her head on something when the Boann
lurched. But I knew right then I couldn’t tell her what she could have from
then on. I saw in her the same thing I seen in men that fought beside me. I
should’a known then.”

Cal stopped and looked at me. He took off his cap again and
look at me as if he were trying to figure out I how I would look in a foxhole
or on that pump. “Another?” I asked and got us both a beer. I wanted him to
keep talking now.

“We got in and that
damn old geezer, not far from my age now, looked at me like I was somebody.
Them guys that was there all year round knew what I had done and they looked at
me like one of their own and I was.”

Cal stopped and then he laughed. It was a sound devoid of
humor or humanity. “Kris looked at me different, too. She was proud of me in a
way that made me feel good. I started looking for another boat, the Boann had
taken a beating, and then that damn fern. The god damn fern.”

“Fern?” I filled my mouth with beer and swallowed hard. “Is
that the name of a boat?’

“Kris’ mama put in I stay ashore while the Bo’ was getting
dry docked.” Cal laughed again. “I was on a step ladder trying to hang one of
those ferns that people hang up,”

“Hanging baskets” I offered. My head was spinning.

“…yeah, whatever, but I went backwards over the porch rail.
Damn near broke my spine. I couldn’t stay on a boat more than a couple of hours
if the wind picked up at all. It was over and I knew it. I sold the Boann and this
is as close to the water as I can get.”

“Whoa” it was all I could think to say.

“You know, we went on one of them cruises but it was like
being at Wal Mart for a week. Folks pushin’ and shovin’ try to get to food that
runs right through you. Boat was so damn big we couldn’t really feel the water.
It was like being in a small town where everybody wants to do the same thing at
the same time. It was as fun as having a pocketful of hornets on a trampoline.”
Cal stopped talking again and I let him. I had drank nearly six beers, or was
it five? Maybe more. But it was more
than I was used to drinking that fast.

“Pain gets me now.” Cal said. “Most of the time it’s pretty
bad, but sometimes it feels like they left something in me. I can feel it,
always, even when I’m tore up drunk. Feels like a hand on me where one’s not
supposed to be. I dodge things now, plants me feet careful like a old lady. You
got mouthy with me and I can’t do nothing about it. I can turn the wrong way
and it knocks me feet out from me. I call it My Drinking Buddy. Sea couldn’t
take my boat from me but a plant in a wire basket did.” Cal drained his beer and
I followed suit. I was totally wasted now. He could have beat me to death with
a feather. I felt like I might puke.

“So you aim to marry Kris?” Cal asked suddenly and I felt
the buzz of the beer bleed away. I still had a can of pepper spray on my
keychain and two years of self-defense classes.

“Yes sir, I do.” I managed to say.

“And you think it’s proper for you two women to act like man
and wife?”

“I do.” I had never been through this before but I knew it
was coming. “I love Kris and I am going to marry her, Cal.” I sat up and
planted my right foot in the sand. He was going to start something and he was
going to do it now. I was going to man the pumps or lose my woman.

“You write that I wanted to take a swim one day, and you
write that I got too far out and couldn’t make it back in.” Cal suddenly
sounded very sober. “You get to writing and don’t forget that’s one hell of a
girl.”

And I watched him stumble towards the surf. Cal made it to
the water, dove over a breaker, and headed out to sea.

Wednesday, May 13, 2015

“I hate the damn beach,” Cal said and it surprised me
because I had always heard he loved the beach.

“I don’t like it either.” I replied and it was true. It’s
far too much sun and far too much sand and what I really liked are the waves,
but it’s always hot and always sandy.

“I don’t give a damn what you like.” Cal said and we fell
silent again.

“And I don’t much give a damn what my daughter likes,
either, even if it’s you.” Cal said suddenly. I sipped my beer and counted to
ten before taking another sip. Cal was hitting his pretty hard and if I couldn’t
talk to the son of a bitch I sure as hell could get drunk with him.

“You’re a,” and Cal paused as if he was searching for a way
to say it nicely, “you’re a writer? You just sit around and write? That’s it?
That’s what you do?” He drained his beer and tossed the can back into the cooler.
I drained mine, too. I reached for another.

“Get me one too, if you cando that.” Cal said as if I might
fumble the can or lose my way.

“And you were an,” and I paused in the same matter, “an
accountant? You just sat there and counted all day?”

“Was a time I would’a dragged your ass out there in the open
and made you bleed til I was tired of the color red.” He said this without a
bit of arrogance in his voice and I nodded because I felt like he might still
try it. “I did that, did she tell you I did that once? Her first boyfriend in
High School, did’she tell you about that?”

“Yeah, she did.” I lied hoping he wouldn’t tell me anyway,

“Fine young man, quarterback on the football team, good
family, all that stuff, but I knew if I messed up that pretty face I wouldn’t
have no trouble with the rest of’em. Brought her home after midnight smelling
of beer and cigarettes and was just going to drop her off and drive off. Pulled
the sum bitch out of the window of his daddy’s car.” Cal killed his beer in
three gulps and so I did too. I got us both another one.

“Like to went to jail over it.” Call sighed. “Made him bleed
plenty but didn’t hurt him, really. I went to a lot of trouble not to hurt his
arm.” Call laughed hard and suddenly. “And I sure as hell didn’t hurt his fists
any!”

I raised my beer to salute him and then we drank together. I
finished first and got us another one.

“Kris,” Cal said, “she took her time getting over that one.
Rebellious type. Started bringing home flute players and mama’s boys and video
game experts. Flute player! How’s a man wake up one day and wanna play a damn
flute? But she never latched onto nobody until now. Went through eight years of
college bringing up that what couldn’t make it through a week of boot camp but
never the same one twice.”

Cal stopped talking and he must have realized what it
sounded like when he said what he had. We drank in silence for a while and when
he was done he got me one too. I killed mine and realized that I was nearing my
limit if I was going to drive. Or walk.

“Kris tell you about the Boann?” Cal asked but his voice was
lower now. He killed his beer very quickly and I struggled to drain mine. He
got us both another one and I took a gulp of it, trying to get it down in case
he chugged his right off the bat, but he leaned forward and looked out over the
water. “She wasn’t a large boat, just something for me to have after I retired
and I thought about renting her out, being a fishing guide, but I don’t know
shit about fish and I can’t stand fishing people. But it was fun to get out on the
water, and I fell in love. I started navigating with a sextant and a compass, I
wasn’t a whole lot good with it but I loved it. I started keep charts and
trying to figure out how the tides and currents worked. Live and breathed it as
much as I could while Kris was trying to get her Pee- Ache- Dee and when she
finally graduated she wanted to go out on the Boann and celebrate. Had that
damn vet she dated for a while, specialized in poodles or some such as that.
Beautiful day, spectacular day, and the Poodle Boy ruined it all because he
couldn’t shut the hell up. I was ready to kill him and Kris just kept laughing
at me every time she could see I was about to explode. It was his fault,
really, and I wish’a Kris had brought that damn flute player instead. I should
have listened to the water, and the wind, but I didn’t, and I knew I hadn’t
done right, and that damn storm caught us out in the open before I could make a
run.”

Cal stopped and rubbed his hands through his hair and then
put his cap back on. He got us both a beer and didn’t say anything at all for a
while. We both drank in silence and I had just finished one beer and started on
the next. If I was going to marry Kris I was going to have to learn to drink. I
was getting intoxicated and it was getting hot. The heat waves rose like the water
and crashed into me. The sea breeze seemed to have died.

“I knew the storm was coming but we were already in when I
realized we weren’t getting around it. Whadda you do? I mean whadda you do? The
wind picked up from nothing to damn near gale and suddenly there was me and the
boat and there was the sea and the wind, and God Almighty had taken real boat
from real sailors and left nothing but a slick spot on the surface afterwards.
I fought that storm. I fought her like I was fightin’ for my family’s life, but truth is I fought it
because I had always wanted it. I wanted to know. I would have never took Kris
and her mama out there for that but it was better they were there, you see?
With them there I couldn’t give up or back down. I had to take everything that
storm had and I had to push the Boann as far as she would go. Poodle Boy was
screaming like a little girl and my wife made a mess of herself screaming with
him, but Kris hung in there.

Finally, the wind backed down, just a little and the rain
slacked off. I still fought it but the storm was dying and then it was gone.
Just like that, the sun came out and you could see it walking out over the water
to try to kill somebody else for the rest of the day. We got in and that damn
old geezer, not far from my age now, looked at me like I was somebody. Them
guys that was there all year round knew what I had done and they looked at me
like one of their own and I was.

Cal stopped and then he laughed. It was a sound devoid of
humor or humanity. “Kris looked at me different, too. She was proud of me in a
way that made me feel good. I started looking for another boat, the Boann had
taken a beating, and then that damn fern. The god damn fern.”

“Fern? I filled my mouth with beer and swallowed hard. I got
another and handed Cal one, too.

“Kris’ mama put in I stay ashore while the Bo’ was getting
dry docked.” Cal laughed again. “I was on a step ladder trying to hang one of
those ferns that people hang up,”

“Hanging baskets” I offered. My head was spinning.

“…yeah, whatever, but I went backwards over the porch rail.
Damn near broke my spine. I couldn’t stay on a boat more than a couple of hours
if the wind picked up at all. It was over and I knew it. I sold the Harpy and
this is as close to the water as I can get.”

“Whoa” it was all I could think to say.

“You know, we went on one of them cruises but it was like
being at Wal Mart for a week. Folks push and shoving try to get to food that
runs right through you. Boat was so damn big we couldn’t really feel the water.
It was like being in a small town where everybody wants to do the same thing at
the same time. It was as fun as having a pocketful of hornets on a trampoline.”
Cal stopped talking again and I let him. I had drank nearly six beer, or was it
five? But it was more than I was used to drinking that fast.

“So you aim to marry Kris?” Cal asked suddenly and I felt
the buzz of the beer bleed away. I still had a can of pepper spray on my
keychain and two years of self-defense classes.

“Yes sir, I do.” I managed to say.

“And you think it’s proper for you two women to act like man
and wife?”

“I do.” I had never been through this before but I knew it
was coming.

“Well then” Cal said, “you go right ahead. But you got to
write something for me.”

“Yeah” I felt he was toying with me. “I’ll do it.”

“You write that I wanted to take a swim one day, and you
write that I got too far and couldn’t make it back in.” Cal suddenly sounded
very sober. “I’m going for a swim. You get to writing.”

And I watched him stumble towards the surf. Cal made to the water,
dove over a breaker, and headed out to sea.

Sunday, May 10, 2015

So for the last week, yes, an entire week, there has been a
housefly in my truck. I’ve entertained the idea that it’s not the same one and
maybe it isn’t but there isn’t a housefly DNA testing kit available right now
so I just have to guess. I’ve opened my window to shoo him out and I’ve drove
at seventy miles an hour with both windows open, but the critter keep
reappearing at odd times as I’m going down the road. So today I named him.
Icarus. Sooner or later, if he doesn’t accept my invite to depart the sun is
going to cook him.

Of course, Icarus is a name that’s going to get me thinking
about all sorts of things and all sorts of things have brought the name Icarus
to me but something is bugging me, no pun intended. I think we’re older than we
think. There’s a couple of digs in Turkey and there’s the way things in Peru
were built, and there’s the Antikythera mechanism, and really, Microsoft,
“Antikythera” is a word you should know, isn’t it? But doesn’t it just seem a
little unlikely that we can trace back to the beginning of civilization, back
in Babylon, Ur, Sumer, and Ugarit, and think we didn’t fail totally before
those city/states were formed? I ask Icarus about this and he stops buzzing
around long enough to sit for a spell, and listen.

Of course, there’s China and Southeast Asia to consider in
all this, and a couple of continents here and there where humans happened to be
at the same time. There’s Atlantis and the Sea People, and we may never know if
they were one in the same or if Atlantis was always fictional. But it’s like
having a small stone in a shoe. I can’t help but think this is actually Us VER
2.0, and whatever happened before, however long Before happens to be, was a
bitch, and it was global. Icarus, I assume by his silence, agrees with my
theory and I am encouraged by this.

Of course, global is a point of view. I have no idea how
advanced anyone was Before, but I’m pretty sure there were some good starts, at
least, in Asia Minor. Of course, the scientist in me says aloud, and that startles
Icarus, “Where is your evidence?” and, of course, I have none. This is pure
fiction but I like pure fiction.

Whatever was here Before, didn’t leave a surfeit of artifacts
behind to guide us. But assured in our knowledge that we already know what the past
looks like, would we be able to make that intellectual leap and realize that
sitting in a pile of pottery was the story of how we can to almost be? Is there
something out there we’ve assigned to this part of the past that belong deeper
in the well? Icarus takes off and lands closer to me, captivated by my ability
to destroy centuries of careful study with nothing more than a conversation
with a flying insect.

But I’ve already formed a storyline. Before there was a
civilization and it was populated by the people who would once define Turkey
and Syria and Greece. But there was some event, naturally occurring, that
crumbled buildings and scattered the people. They dug in, at first, but
realized they had to go, and there were too few metal tools and no way to
preserve the writings. Another couple of thousand years would pass before we
would or even could try again, and by that time, spoken word legends and myths,
and a few dwellings carved into solid rock, were all that were left of our
cousins’ attempts at becoming us.

Icarus is delighted with the story. He sits and cocks his
head to one side, and he asks what happened to the people, where did they go,
and why. I have to think about this. Maybe, and I’m just talking to a housefly
here, no offense, Icarus, (none taken, continue) Before happened to a certain
region. We know that humans more or less came Out Of African, but suppose they
settled in Asia Minor, but After they began to migrate? Or maybe some of them
migrated before the event which is why we would have places like Angkor Wat way
before anything happened in places much closer to Africa. But then again, what
happened to that city? A million people could have lived there but no one knows
how.

Icarus mildly suggests that I brush up on my archeology and
I have to admit that I have more questions and ignorance than I do knowledge
and answers. Maybe, I suggest aloud, fiction writers are merely failed
scholars. Icarus nods in agreement.

Yet even today, in our most enlightened form yet, (that’s
pretty good sarcasm, Icarus notes) we have religious zealots destroying
artifacts from the past. Who is to say that some culture took what was left of
Before and razed it to the ground or simply took the pieces away to build pig
pens and goat fences, like some people in Egypt did with stones taken from the
Pyramids? We have never been kind to the past for very long.

The earth Herself has never cared for the past either. The
jungle devours civilizations much more quickly than we have built there. The
sands of the deserts erode carved stone one grain of sand at a time and time is
something the desert has as much of as sand. Anything built near the sea will
be enveloped by it. Mountains shake and the plains quake. Rivers leave their
banks and become tourists in places where humans have made a desperate stand
for permanence. As forests are downed by our kind for homes those very homes
are prone to fire and decay.

Icarus reminds me that he’s spent most of his life in my
truck and a good portion of it speaking to me today. I open the windows once
again but I cannot tell if he’s hiding in the back somewhere or if he’s finally
free. I let the windows up and I know Icarus will not survive the sun.

Tuesday, May 5, 2015

Lucas dug up a ceramic electrical insulator, one of those
brown screw in deals that were prevalent fifty or so years ago. He brought the
thing to me and it freaked me out because he could have been seriously cut had
he chewed on it but he didn’t so he wasn’t. I did take it away from him and
half an hour later he showed up with another just like it. It took me a minute
or two to find the first one and realize there was two and not just one. I have
both of these employed as part of the electric fence and they’ll never wear
out. After I’m gone maybe someone else’s dog will dig them up again.

So today Tanya the Destroyer shows up with an old blue
bottle in her mouth. Lucaseque in her gift giving, Tanya brings me something
that freaks me out because she might have been hurt if she chewed it but she
didn’t so she wasn’t. I’ve searched for where the Blue Bottle might have originated
from and there are three dig sites that Tanya has shown a lot of interest in.
One of them is near where Loki found the insulators and I wonder what else
might be lurking down there and why the dogs dig this place.

There was a pile of junk in one spot neat where I started a
Firepit and I assume it was all pushed off the current parcel of land or
somewhere near. There’s bricks and stuff that I’ve unearthed, but that tells me
little; the European invaders arrived here over four hundred years ago and
many, many people have come and gone since the first invasion. Many homes may
have been built here, burned or decayed away, maybe even moved, but there is
only what the dogs have given me to remind me that I am not the first here.

I’m thinking about getting one of those small concrete
crypts and burying it out here, deep and unmarked, so that one day someone
might find it and have some clue as to who lived out where and what has
happened since I’ve arrived. I would include digital storage devices, certainly
but also hard copies of photos and things I’ve written and maybe voice
recordings.

“Hi! My name is Mike Firesmith and I died a long time ago.
This is what you will find in this box and these are my reasons for leaving
these items for you to find.”

I would bury it deep enough so that someone digging for
worms couldn’t find it but someone looking to discover why their dog had been
digging in the area might.

Let’s say I buried it two meters deep. I think if I put a
layer of glass bottles from this era under a sheet of thin metal just 75 centimeters
deep someone might find it while digging. In each of the bottles would be the
message, “Keep digging” but that’s predicated on the knowledge of English.
Well, I do have to start somewhere. About at the one point five meter mark
there would be another layer of bottles with more of the same messages but with
a map of how far to go as opposed to how far gone so far.

I wonder if I could get someone to keep a map of where the box
is and then they pass it on to someone else and finally, one hundred year from
now, it is opened again. Or maybe the map would be lost and the box might stay
underground for two hundred or three hundred years. I would like that. I would
like to think that someone who just got a ground penetrating radar device for
their sixteen birthday would upload the data from their drone and discover I
left them something a couple of meters
down there.

Now that I have had that thought I realize where both Lucas
and Tanya the Destroyer were digging was near an Oak tree that had been long
dead when I arrived. The top part of the tree had already fallen but there was
a stump, a monolith really, about three meters tall. I pulled it down after it started
leaning and left it to decay back into the earth. I wonder if someone left
somewhere near that tree, and it lies there now, waiting to be discovered by
more than just mutts?

More than any other generation, we have the ways and means
to preserve something of our lives and leave it hidden for others for a very
long time. I never realized it until this very moment but there are companies
who will do all the work for you in this. But I was looking for someone a
little more personal. I want to take the risk of it never being found and if it
is found, for it to be a personal experience. I want it to be something someone
who lives here can sink their fingers into the earth to discover, if people
still do that when I’m very long gone. Yes, that is the way I will go; I will
build it myself and bury it myself and leave nothing but clues in the earth to
guide the future Hermit to find it again.

Tanya is a digger in the same class of excavators as Bert
was. I think I’m just going to kick back and see what this baby girl brings
forth out of the ground. In the meantime I’m going to build a small concrete
box and make sure that it’s buried near an Oak tree. I may even plant one in
front of it, or behind it, and clear the area around the tree, not that there’s
any guarantee the tree will survive. But life isn’t about guarantees, is it?

I just realized I compared Tanya with Bert and Lucas in the
same day. I’ve been telling myself she has to go because she doesn’t get along
with the Lilith or Tyger Linn as much as I would like. There’s no guarantee she
ever will.

Saturday, May 2, 2015

Tanya wasn’t about to let me sleep in this morning and I
wasn’t trying. I got her up and wore her out so she would be easier to handle
at the Adoption Event. This would be my fourth try in finding Tanya The
Destroyer a new home. For breakfast she had kibble, a roll of toilet paper, and
a small mirror I got out of her mouth at the last moment. Keep the bathroom
door closed, Mike, keep the bathroom door closed. It’s not rocket science, it’s
a door, with a knob, and it swings towards you when pulled.

Tanya is a work in progress. The first adoption event went
poorly because she was so vocal. The Back In Black Event was even worse because
it was crowded and Tanya was really vocal. The advent of the squirt bottle
brought a lot of the vocalizations to a complete stop and now she’s pretty laid
back, maybe too laid back, when she’s at an event. Tanya does not like being
there. I think she realizes I do not like being there either. It is very noisy.
It is very crowded. And that’s out of my zone.

On the upside, there are some people in dog rescue that are
just this side of superheroes. Some of them have so many fosters they aren’t
sure how many they have at any given moment. Some have entire litters of
puppies. But all of these people are burning away their weekend trying to help
get dogs into homes and honestly, it’s humbling to watch so many handle so much
when I’ve got my hands full with this one little girl dog.

There was puppy hit by a car and his owner took him to the vet.
The vet told the guy what it would cost and it would include amputating the dog’s
leg. The guy simply walked away from his dog and left him there. The Dog People
stepped up and stepped in and rescued that puppy. I watched today as someone came
in and fell in love with him. Tonight he’ll sleep in his new home with his new
family and he will live happily ever after. That’s what we do. We take companion
animals who been throw away, discarded, abandoned, abused neglected and we take
them out of hell and find people who can make their lives heaven.

The little Dachshund mix, Gabby, had been around forever. I
tried to get a friend of mine to adopt her. Gabby was a sweet girl but no one
had offered her their heart. She went today. I saw Gabby with her new people
and I know how hard it is for her foster family to let go. But this is what we
do.

You should go to an event. Just help out, put crates together,
walkthe dogs once an hour, help make sure they have water, and just get into a
conversation with some of these rescue people. It’s like talking to a war vet
or someone who has ran the Appalachian Trail at night, or someone who has spent
a great deal of their spare time saving a lot of dogs. They are awesome people.

Tanya is getting better at telling me when she’s just cranky
at having to be there and when she has to urinate. There’s a tone of voice she
uses that tell me that I better get her paws on some grass soon or there’s
going to be a wet crate bottom. She went twice today and both times it seemed
as if she really had to go. We also reached the milestone of Tanya having a bowel
movement while on the leash. Unfortunately, she did it in front of the Old Navy
store right next to PetSmart. Oh, hi everyone, we’re just talking a dump here,
never mind us, ha ha. I didn’t have any baggies with me because Tanya never
goes except at home so I had to take her back into PetSmart, get her settled
in, find some bags, and go back out and clean up the mess before some stepped
in it. A woman pushing a baby stroller headed for the mess and all I could do
is stand there and watch in horror. Against all odd, all the wheels and both
her shoes totally missed the pile, which was, by the way, quite impressive as
far as these things go.

There were some interested parties and some people who just
want to see dogs. We get a lot of people who are looking for a dog but they are
looking for that dog and will know when they find it. Someone came in with a Weimaraner
and it broke my heart all over again. That face and those eyes that look as if
we had met before. But they were only passing through. I would have adopted
that dog on the spot and left and never looked back. I had to step back and get
a grip on myself and nearly did not.

The morning came and went, I felt comfortable getting out
for a few moments to go get something to eat and Tanya was good while I was
gone. (Thanks Hayley!) She’s getting used to the events and she’s getting used
to there being strange people and strange dog around her. Most of the people
are very nice and most of the dogs aren’t reactive. Tanya didn’t growl or lunge
at any other dogs today and she was quiet, well, mostly she was anyway.

After the event, Tanya seemed really glad to get away from the
place and I was, too. It wears me out being there but I am getting better at
dealing with it. The people help, the Dog People help, it’s a nonstop
conversation as to who was adopted, who is pregnant, who found what dog where,
and most of all, how everyone, dogs and fosters, are doing. People come, dogs
are adopted, but there are always more than we can handle. We need more
fosters, we need people to spay and neuter, and we need people to stop abusing
the animals who love them.

Facebook Badge

Donate To The Dogfood Fund

About Me

The Non Disclaimer

My writing reflects the things I see, think, and experience, and those things in my past that have led me to be me. It is not always pretty, it is not always funny, and no one has ever made mention of my life as a Disney Movie. If sex, drugs, profanity, or a general irreverence for all things religious somehow offends you, well, there are other blogs which will satisfy your need for self assurance.